Hi. My name is Sandra Wesley.
Normally, I would testify in French, because we are a Montreal group. However, due to interpretation issues and time constraints, I will do it in English.
I am very sorry; I apologize to Ms. Gaudreau and other francophones.
I'm going to continue in English.
However, I will be very happy to answer questions in French.
Before I begin, I want to be very clear that this committee's hostility toward sex workers will contribute to violence against us. The actions so far of this committee have been hostile and have contributed to harming sex workers. Any further repressive measures against sex workers will absolutely kill many of us. This is the level of seriousness that this has for us. Every demeaning and every dehumanizing thing that is said is heard loud and clear by every aggressor, abuser and exploiter out there.
We saw it recently in Atlanta, with a man who aimed to eradicate all massage parlours, all Asian massage parlours, and went and killed several women in a massage parlour. We see this time and time again. When our governments send out a message that they want to eradicate us, people take that into their own hands and find different ways of carrying out the government's mandate.
Stella is an organization by and for sex workers. We were created in Montreal in 1995. We represent sex workers. We are sex workers ourselves. We do not represent or defend the rights of third parties in the industry. We have no opinion on any specific company or individual who works around sex workers. We are not for or against. Some websites work very well for some people and can be the absolute worst for someone else. However, third parties are necessary for a lot of sex workers. Especially when we're working online, the average sex worker does not have the time, energy and knowledge to create her own entire website in terms of distribution or method of payment and processing. We need to work with other people.
Our community is very diverse and broad. It includes women who work in porn full time and part time; people who perform in videos with other performers; solo videos; videos they produce themselves or with third parties; women who post content on major platforms, such as Pornhub, or on smaller online communities or their own websites; women who do live work on camera versus pre-recorded videos; and people who work through all kinds of different models, including a lot of women who combine some online work with other types of sex work, in person or remotely. It is very important to not have a narrow view of pornography while you're focusing on one single website and to make regulations for one website while ignoring the massive diversity in the sex industry.
In terms of this inquiry, we can't make any assumption about why you decided to investigate Pornhub specifically. However, we can certainly witness the context in which this is happening. In December 2020 an article was published by The New York Times denouncing Pornhub specifically and making all kinds of claims about its content and procedures. To our community of women working in the sex industry, this type of sensational reporting is nothing new. It's been happening consistently over many decades. Anti-porn activists and anti-sex work activists have been active for a long time. This is how they operate. They try to come up with the most sensational, most dramatic stories and put them out into the media to get a reaction out of society. Over time, their overt arguments against porn in general have become less effective. The course has shifted to talking about violence and exploitation, trafficking or about the presence of youth in the sex industry.
These extremely emotional arguments are not necessarily representative of the true objectives of those groups or of the reality of sex work. It creates this big dichotomy where it positions people. You can either be against exploitation, and therefore against sex work and pornography, or you can be in favour of sex workers' rights. Somehow that's being construed as being supportive of that kind of exploitation.
I urge you, in your duties as members of Parliament who are sworn to work within the charter and not on emotion, to take a step back and look in a more objective and non-ideological manner at the situation and what led you to decide to spend so much time on the follow-up of a New York Times article that was written by a journalist with a very long history of exploitative reporting, of sensational reporting not just about sex work but about sexual violence in general.
This particular reporter also has been called out in the past for writing an entirely fabricated story [Technical difficulty—Editor] organization, which raised a lot of money for this completely fake organization. We know that this is not someone with high standards, and we know that this is someone who has been very willing to use his position as a reporter to push an anti-sex-work ideology.
You've also heard about who instigated campaigns against Pornhub, which you've actually heard from. One of those groups has a new name now. It's called the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. This is a recent rebranding of a group known as Morality in Media.
Morality in Media was founded in the early seventies or maybe late sixties. Specifically, their initial mandate was to eradicate all erotica literature from bookstores. They felt that it went against their Christian values. They are well known in the United States for such campaigns as boycotting Disney in the nineties because of their non-Christian content, wanting to eradicate the National Endowment for the Arts because they were worried that some artists might be making some sexual content, and boycotting Madonna and other pop artists. Ultimately, what they want is the eradication of all content from the Internet or society that does not meet their view of heterosexual, Christian, monogamous relationships.
A few years ago, seeing that this message was not getting them anywhere, they rebranded and focus now on this notion of sexual exploitation and human trafficking, because those are the buzzwords that get everyone from every party to stop and listen to them. Who instigated this? Obviously not anyone who has the well-being of women or sex workers at heart.
The other group, Exodus Cry, also rebranding over the past few years, is fundamentally a religious group with very violent views, specifically towards the LGBTQ2S+ community. Their goal is to also eradicate all sex that doesn't meet their Christian standard. They're violently anti-gay, violently anti-trans and violently against sex workers. They despise us and want to eliminate us.
Collectively, those groups obviously are not friends of sex workers. Starting an inquiry based on their assessment of a problem will never lead to anything positive within the community. Their only goal is to eradicate pornography.
You've heard also from some groups who brand themselves as feminists and who also have very ideological views. Instead of maybe a religious argument, they bring forward an argument based on their view of feminism, which is being increasingly marginalized and excluded from mainstream feminism. They're fundamentally anti-trans and anti-sex-workers, and they also share the religious groups' goal of eradicating us. They cannot be listened to when it comes to making our work safer or to tweaking anything in our industry to improve anyone's safety, because their goal is not that.
We've also seen a long history of repressive measures against sex work on the Internet, and repressive measures against the Internet in general, where sex work is the excuse to push that forward. In the nineties, when the Internet became a more common consumer-based thing, in the United States those same groups mobilized, because they wanted to essentially ban the Internet. The United States at that point was able to pass a law that included a section that makes websites not liable for the content on their platforms. This is the reason that we have the Internet as we know it today.
The first time any erosion of those rights happened was in SESTA and FOSTA, again in the United States, a few years ago. This created an exception to section 230, which now makes websites liable for sex work happening on their platforms. This has had devastating impacts. You can look up what sex workers have had to say about SESTA and FOSTA in the United States and elsewhere. It has led to a lot of deaths and a lot of violence. It's opening the door to further and further regulation of the Internet, to the point where all kinds of content gets captured under this increased censorship that we're seeing.
We've seen websites—for example, Tumblr, which had sexual content—simply choose to get rid of all the sexual content, which for the most part had nothing to do with sex work, just in case they were caught up in this. We've seen Facebook ban eggplant emojis and peach emojis. This is kind of funny on one level, but it is also an indication of how this liability for companies leads to a very drastic eradication of sexual content. It's making it harder for queer youths and for young people in general to get sexual education online because that also gets captured under pornographic content that should be eradicated.
I want to address a little bit about what sex workers actually need when it comes to—
